Remfry's Dancers Show Full Range Of Human Emotions

November 17, 2002|By Matt Schudel Arts Writer

By now it's become such a clichM-i that no one even questions it: The purpose of art is to shock. In today's art world, the prizes routinely go to displays of flickering lights, animals sliced up in tanks of formaldehyde, piles of lint (or bricks, sticks, rotting vegetables or garbage). It's reached the point where artists seem almost proud of forcing the public into a defensive crouch against visual and moral assault.

So when you find an exhibition -- by a living artist, no less -- that isn't about social grievance, sexual indulgence or stylistic excess, well, that's what I would call art that shocks. In a new exhibition at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, British artist David Remfry has dared to present more than 100 raw, unapologetic paintings and drawings of people in the act of ... dancing. A few drawings show couples in the nude, but the vast majority of his dancers are boldly, shamelessly clothed.

In Britain, Remfry is a noted portrait artist (he has painted John Gielgud, among others) and is collaborating on a high-profile advertising campaign with fashion designer Stella McCartney, the daughter of Paul. "Dancers," his second exhibition at the Boca museum in the past three years, is accompanied by a lavish catalog with essays from several leading art critics.

Remfry began to make drawings and watercolors of friends and ordinary people dancing in the mid-1980s, and before long an artistic avocation grew into a genre. He showed dancers in various combinations -- old people and young, women and men -- and often depicted himself as a partner to taller women.

"I am not a good dancer," he says, "but I am an enthusiastic dancer."

The Boca Raton exhibition, curated by museum director George S. Bolge, marks the first time most of these works have been seen in public. When Remfry visited the museum last week, he was accompanied by the British consul-general to the United States, Sir Thomas Harris.

"I'm interested in the export of British goods," said Sir Thomas, "and David happens to be one of the best British exports we've sent to the United States."

A small, reticent man of 60, Remfry now lives in New York at the Hotel Chelsea, the longtime gathering spot of bohemian culture. ("I feel more alive in New York than I do anywhere else," he says.)

He claims to have become a figurative painter almost by accident, after attending art school in the early 1960s, when most of his teachers and fellow students were following the prevailing vogue of abstraction.

"I would dearly have liked to have painted in that way," he says. "I did make forays in that direction, but I never felt it to be my own. It just didn't hold anything for me."

Instead, Remfry loosely allied himself with a small yet significant movement of British figurative painters that included Francis Bacon, Michael Andrews, David Hockney and the American expatriate R.B. Kitaj. He also found inspiration in the direct, unblushing art of George Grosz and the German Expressionists, in the graceful draftsmanship of the 19th century French master Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and in the classic painters of the Renaissance.

Remfry began painting in watercolor in 1979, when a case of viral arthritis made the laborious preparation of oil paints and brushes too strenuous. He now works almost exclusively in watercolor, often in a large, almost life-size scale.

"It's absolutely my preferred medium," he says. "I like its immediacy and the fact that it's slightly dangerous -- it's very hard to cover your mistakes."

His output may not have the mysterious depth of Degas' paintings of dancers, or the demimonde drama of Toulouse-Lautrec's, but they are fresh works that live fully in the present while nodding respectfully toward the past.

"Dancing is a great way of engaging two or more figures in one painting," says Remfry. "It's a tremendous metaphor for life. Munch painted The Dance of Life and The Dance of Death."

In some ways, Remfry is a colorist as much as a portraitist. His pigment is surprisingly vivid for watercolor, a medium best known for its vapory pastels. If you cover the heads of his dancers, the play of volume, color and movement across the paper possesses an almost abstract quality.

As bold as the watercolors are, Remfry's drawings are often rendered with more confidence, immediacy and refinement of line. A darker nuance of character emerges from the drawing of Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Ross, for instance, than from the sweetened watercolor of the same couple. Moreover, in the unforgiving medium of watercolor, Remfry can't always hide the unnatural proportions, awkward hand angles and frozen expressions of some of his figures.